In today's world when a user purchases a media file (e.g., music) from service providers, the media file as delivered may have a 16 bits/sample encoding resolution and a 44.1 kHz sampling rate, similar or the same as a compact disk (CD). Hereinafter, the encoding resolution is referred to as a number of bits encoded used for each sampled media signal.
The idea of high resolution media is becoming popular because hobbyist and audiophiles are purchasing equipments to encode their original analog media on vinyl with a higher resolution. For a relatively high resolution media, a typical resolution used for encoding may be 24 bits/sample and the sampling rate Fs may be 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 96 kHz, or the like.
Such increase in resolution may add both additional visual or sound precision to the media, but also increase the dynamic range. With the additional bits in each sample, the dynamic range can be wider.
Thus, users may want to upgrade their media files for an increased resolution, optimizing storage resource usage. A normal upgrade may only add additional files to the storage device, replacing relatively low resolution files (e.g., 16 bits/sample resolution media file) with the relatively high resolution files (e.g., 24 bits/sample resolution media file).
If the users want to keep both the low and high resolution files, the storage space may be required to be as much the size of the respective low and high resolution files.